Keywords

Emergency management, Employees -- Attitudes, Transformational leadership, United States -- Federal Emergency Management Agency

Abstract

As the capacity of public leaders to bring about change is increasingly questioned, public agencies have come under pressure to transform and innovate. More research is needed to identify how leaders who promote innovation, creativity, and adaptability affect the performance of public organizations. Constant improvement of organizations and individuals encourages leaders to innovate, evaluate risks as opportunities, and tackle the status quo. This raises the significance of how transformational leadership contributes to organizational performance and reacts to public agencies‘ environment, and how it might reorganize them. The present study examines the relationship between transformational leadership behaviors and perceived leadership effectiveness in public organizations, particularly Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The study specifically focuses on FEMA as an independent agency and as an agency under the Department of Homeland Security. It also measures transformational leadership behaviors and explores how they relate to public employees‘ perceptions of leadership effectiveness as reported by the 2002, 2006, and 2008 Federal Human Capital Surveys (FHCS). Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to validate the construct validity for the perceived leadership iv effectiveness measurement model. Structural equation modeling was conducted to examine the study hypotheses. This study has found that transformational leadership behaviors—idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, and inspirational motivation— all have a significant relationship with perceived leadership effectiveness. Each dimension of transformational leadership has a positive effect on employees‘ perceptions of leadership effectiveness, with intellectual stimulation having the highest effect. The standardized regression weights of exogenous variables are: .24 for idealized influence, .48 for intellectual stimulation, and .29 for inspirational motivation. Overall, these predictor variables accounted for 86% of the variance in perceived leadership effectiveness. Findings of the study reveals several organizational, managerial, and policy implications relating to increasing the effects of transformational leadership behaviors on employees‘ perceived leadership effectiveness and organizational performance. The study points out the significance of communication and information sharing, and providing sufficient opportunities to do a better job in public organizations. The findings also confirm that the leaders are required to obtain inspirational motivation behaviors and use them to give a feeling of personal empowerment to the employees

Notes

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Graduation Date

2010

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Kapucu, Naim

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Health and Public Affairs

Degree Program

Public Affairs

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0003397

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0003397

Language

English

Release Date

December 2010

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Health and Public Affairs;Health and Public Affairs -- Dissertations, Academic;

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